Maybe you thought you had a stressful holiday season. The Wyeths probably had you beat, considering that daughter Brooke came home with a tell-all book she wrote that threatens to blow the family apart.

The play “Other Desert Cities,” which opened Wednesday at Vermont Stage, is built upon that premise. Brooke’s about-to-be-published book is the ticking time bomb that creates all the pressure in Jon Robin Baitz’s sometimes bleak and often pointedly funny script, which director Mark Alan Gordon and his strong cast deliver to a satisfying finish.

The Wyeths are led by parents Polly and Lyman (Karen Lefkoe and Bill Carmichael), old-guard Hollywood icons and Republicans who live in wealth and comfort in Palm Springs, Calif. Brooke (Eva Gil) has moved as far as she can from her parents, and not just geographically. She lives on the East Coast and is as liberal and spontaneous as her parents are conservative and regimented.

She and her ebulliently cranky mother do have one thing in common. Polly Wyeth declares at one point “I like to spar,” and Brooke, a button-pusher if ever there was one, has learned from her mother how to create a good tussle where none existed before.

Brooke has written a book about the devastating loss of her older brother, Henry, which she blames in large part on her parents, who desperately want Brooke to nix the book. Caught in the middle of all this are her younger brother, Trip (Justin Quackenbush), who just wants the family to celebrate a happy holiday season and tries to mollify them all (good luck), and Polly’s sardonic, recovering-alcoholic sister, Silda (Dana Block), who gives “Other Desert Cities” much of its comic relief.

Polly, sensing that Brooke is about to tear the household apart, notes that “families get terrorized by their weakest member.” She says her secretive, troubled daughter has “a lot of locked doors in her doll house,” but by play’s end it’s apparent that tendency may be just one more thing Brooke has inherited from her mother.

The chemistry of the fine cast took awhile to develop on opening night, but things started to gel once the second act began with a verbal jousting match between the two siblings. The remainder of the play became the sort of story that’s too painfully personal to watch and too honestly told to look away from. “Other Desert Cities” has a lot to say about the sometimes caustic bonds of family, but also about the real effects our cultural obsession with every scrap of information from celebrities’ lives has on the people whose lives spurred those details, no matter how true those details may be.

Despite all the nasty threats and barbed words, there’s love in the Wyeth household that permeates “Other Desert Cities.” There must be love; that’s where the tension comes from.